There’s making liquor — the 37-year-old was made head distiller by Compass Distillers after owners realized how passionate one of their carpenters was about the craft.

There’s the chemistry of it all.

“From a chemistry and biochemistry perspective, it’s quite interesting,” the Dalhousie chemistry graduate said of making liquor.

“You’re converting starches to fermentable sugars and then the distillation part of it is actually fractional distillation.”

And then there’s the meandering nature of life’s path that has seen Edelstein go from chemist to carpenter to distiller.

Graham Collins gets it.

He’s a mechanical engineer who, as of Compass’s Tuesday “soft opening,” is now a distillery owner.

He and co-owners Josh Judah and David LaGrand have opened the doors on the latest addition to Nova Scotia’s growing craft distilling industry.

Every process of turning the raw local ingredients into spirits is done on site at the grain-to-glass distillery. The company has been two years in the making, which is a quick turnaround for an idea that involves tearing down and rebuilding an existing structure to become a piece of defining architecture in Halifax’s north end.

Pedestrians on Agricola can stand outside, looking in through the round windowed storefront of “The Tower.”

Then there’s the distilling — an art unto itself.

For sale right now they have vodka and gin. As well, there is a whiskey they’re marketing as a moonshine and a rum they are calling Rhumb — regulations state that a whiskey must be aged three years before it can be labelled as whiskey, and rum has to age a year before it can be called rum.

“We don’t have a time machine,” said Collins of waiting for their rums and whiskey to age.